Hey Remkus I’d like to request a new…

Hey Remkus, I’d like to request a new Rosetta site de-ch.wordpress.org. I’ve imported the formal translations for Swiss German on translate.wordpress.org. Please let me know what the next steps would be. Nick

Not sure what you’re saying here. They way I understood it from Nick is that the formal de_CH version would most like be more used than the informal one currently available and thus would deserve a proper site.

Regarding Rosetta page: I think the ZIP should contain the formal Swiss version of the .po files. If someone then installs WordPress from the official Swiss German ZIP he/she will also see the Swiss German blog postings on the admin dashboard widgets.

What is the purpose of gsw and de_CH? Please see http://www.ethnologue.com/country/CH/languages for disambiguation. Is it that de_CH is significantly different from bothde_DEandgsw? I’m asking because there is no mention in Ethnologue of a version of Swiss German somewehere between Standard German and Schwyzerdütsch. Might this be just a matter of formal vs. informal variants of gsw?

the formal de_CH version would most like be more used than the informal one currently available and thus would deserve a proper site.

I’m not so sure. Other languages have variants (pt_PT and de_DE, at least), and those do not usually warrant a separate site. Remember that an additional site requires additional maintenance. Granted there is the question of packaging releases, which isn’t variant-aware, but maybe @nacin has plans or can recommend a sensible approach to this.

I’m not so sure. Other languages have variants (pt_PT and de_DE, at least), and those do not usually warrant a separate site. Remember that an additional site requires additional maintenance. Granted there is the question of packaging releases, which isn’t variant-aware, but maybe @nacin has plans or can recommend a sensible approach to this.

The “treating it as a separate site” came from the wish to do proper releases and the expectation the formal version would actually find itself on more installations than the informal.

Looks like a bug to to me, but there’s been some activity on the GP repo lately, maybe @yoavf or @markoheijnen can take a look.

Regarding the bug, I’m guessing it has something to do with copying dev to 3.9 project in GlotPress?

I do indeed have near-term (4.0) plans to fix up all release packaging, including locale variants.

Nick Weisser
5:03 pm on May 5, 2014

Although occasionally you will find websites or books published in spoken Swiss German (ISO code gsw), most publications including newspapers are written in de_CH, i.e. formal German with de_CH spelling which slightly differs from the de_DE spelling. As far as I understand de.wordpress.org is de_DE. For Austria the difference between de_DE and de_AT might be neglectable, but I’m sure there are people who will also disagree with that 🙂

I’m maintaining the de_CH language pack for Magento and think it absolutely makes sense to have a separate language pack for de_CH, because not only the spelling is different (ss instead of ß), but also some of the words are different, e.g. Kanton instead of Bundesland.

When building an e-commerce website based on WordPress there’s one more aspect that comes into play, i.e. number formatting. You need to configure the de_CH locale in a Swiss store, because floating numbers like 1.25 are formatted the same way as in the US, whereas in Germany and Austria they are formatted with a comma, i.e. 1,25.

I’m not sure how other countries with more than one official language handle this (Switzerland has 4 official languages), but another reason for having our own Rosetta site is the country specific blog postings which are pulled into the “WordPress News” section of the admin dashboard of Swiss German (de_CH) WordPress installations.

If I install the regular German ZIP package of WordPress I see German “WordPress Nachrichten” in the dashboard with events in Hamburg that are not necessarily relevant for Swiss WordPress users. So either the Swiss WordPress community would have to post their stuff on blog.wpde.org (as de.wordpress.org has no blog postings) or on ch.wordpress.org.

So in conclusion the best thing for Switzerland would actually be the Rosetta site ch.wordpress.org for all 4 official languages where you can download 4 different ZIP archives, one for each language. If that does not make sense, the 2nd best option would be de-ch.wordpress.org and if that does not make sense either, we would probably have to create our own “inofficial” domain where we gather the ZIP archives for all 4 official languages and can provide a Swiss WordPress news blog, too.

This argument makes a lot more sense, thank you for that. We’ll implement de_CH, but I’ll still need it in the proper request format.

Some notes:

For Austria the difference between de_DE and de_AT might be neglectable,

It’s not, and never, ever say this to an Austrian, much less a Viennese 🙂

the Rosetta site ch.wordpress.org for all 4 official languages where you can download 4 different ZIP archives, one for each language

This is not doable right now, the best we can do is offer a de-ch.wordpress.org. Not only can we not do “country” Rosetta sites, nor can we do “meta-language” Rosetta sites (think a new fr, de or pt Rosetta site, that would list all variants of a language). That said, the necessity is clear (even if the priority mightn’t be) and I’m all for discussing what it would take to have those available.